Friday, August 29, 2008

Eat it Over the Sink

Thank goodness – it’s finally juicy-luscious harvest time, when, without apology, even grownups can get down and get messy.  Whether you’ve got a sunset-colored peach exploding nectar down your chin, or thick slices of a homegrown tomato spurting slippery seeds out the sides of your BLT, now is the time for my favorite piece of wisdom: “If it’s messy, eat it over the sink.” It has the ring of grandmotherly truth, but I heard it first from the witty contemporary novelist Tom Robbins.  Let me say it again: “If it’s messy, eat it over the sink.” Think how it reverberates!  I mean, it’s practical advice when you’re slurping watermelon in a shirt you hope to still wear after your snack, but think how it applies to all those Real Life situations that we’d do well to admit can never be mopped up with a napkin. So, why try?

We may know in our hearts that the world is smeary shades of gray – and yet we seem to long for simple clarity.  Isn’t that one of the appeals of the Olympics? On the one hand, there’s the playground-nostalgia for winners and losers – the blunt simplicity of gold, silver and bronze.  But of course we know it’s messier than that – whether it’s Michael Phelps’s hundredth of a second finger-touch win, or the fairy-sized Chinese girls’ gymnasts, or suspicions of doping souring the air—we know better than to think there’s absolute purity in any decision.

And after a week of the Democratic convention, can we think of anything sloppier than electioneering politics?  There’s no use bemoaning the loss of simpler times; from powdered-wigs onward, Americans have always needed hip-waders for this mucky business.  But we’re fools, I’d argue, for wishing our candidates would offer clean, simple solutions for truly sticky problems. Better to embrace the “just eat it over the sink” attitude for issues from reproductive rights to the use of military force that deserve to be explored in all their messy complexity. We’re more likely to find common ground, shared purpose and strength, somewhere in those mingling juices than in cut-and-dried side-taking.  Maybe that’s why Hillary Clinton wore a suit the color of ripe oranges for the speech she hoped would remind Democrats of past struggles that yielded the taste of victory.

Our ancestors knew quite a lot about the goodness that can come from juicy messes, as I was reminded in an heirloom tomato tasting event last week in a South Bend community garden.  Golly, some of those old varieties are ugly as the hind end of a baboon, but the taste – omilord – my eyes were rolling back in my head while juice ran down my arms.  We slurped mottled Green Moldovans with a surprise kick of lime. We savored Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes, compared in one catalogue to a “mahogany-colored Bartlett pear with greenish shoulders”—but get this – they taste of chocolate – no joke!  For a heavenly hour, we rolled the multi-colored tomato flesh on our tongues, trying to name the many notes with the linguistic panache of wine connoisseurs.  We licked the juices off our fingers, laughing as we crooked forward to keep the drips off our clothes.  What sad madness that Americans have come to accept as normal the genetic freak tomatoes piled in grocery store pyramids like dry, red tennis balls.  No mess, it’s true. And no sweetness, no juice, no operatic range of complex flavors.  At the evening’s end, in the jungle of that late-summer garden, we smeared the seeds of our favorites onto strips of paper towels, with their eccentric names penciled on the top, to air-dry and preserve for next summer’s bounty.

What better time of year than these still-sun-rich-but-fading-to-gold harvest days to remind ourselves that what yields the most juice, the most flavor, the most promise, may also require us to get dirty and not mind.  You want politics that reflect our complexity as Americans?  Then be willing to have messy conversations with people who have different taste than you.  Go on – be inspired by the abundance of the harvest. Sure, it’s messy, but there’s room at the sink for all of us.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on August 29, 2008
Community • Customs & Rituals • Food • Home & Garden • News & Editorial • Sports & Recreation • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, August 22, 2008

Looking at Dinosaurs

Everyone loves dinosaurs.  You show me a four year old, a middle-aged crank, and even an old fogey and the one thing they have in common is a love of dinosaurs.  Now, why?  As explanations go, the best I’ve heard is that dinosaurs are big, scary, and dead.  The dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago are particularly astonishing, and I’ve happily given in to my little boy’s endless fascination with these beasts.  We’ve gone many times this summer to look at Sue, the T-Rex that greets you at the door, and her many cousins.  One of the things I find most endearing about the Field Museum is its absolute, take-no-prisoners approach to the subject of evolution.  Every single item in this vast museum screams it.  Whether I’m looking at some tiny fragment of an immense skeleton or some stuffed bird, you can hear the entire museum saying to you, “this thing existed because of natural selection.  Here in the Field Museum, we deal in the world of science and the ancient paw or eye socket or absolutely bizarre snout you’re looking at right now developed over millions of years because of this thing called evolution, and it is the reason why they look that way and, further, why we now exist in the shape we do.  Now go look at the next thing.” I am reminded here of that great quotation by Henry David Thoreau, who once observed, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” Oh, one more thing about the Field Museum: they have a Corner Bakery with decent coffee.  The whole day is a perfect staycation.

I also saw some dinosaurs the other day, but of a very different sort.  A friend and I went to the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart—that’s “recreational vehicles” for you neophytes—neatly located at the intersection of Executive Parkway and Reagan Court.  Here I wandered around the historic and brand new RVs that millions of Americans have driven across this great land of ours.  There was a 1916 “telescoping apartment” built onto a Model T that gives new meaning to the phrase sleeping snugly, a super-mod one from the 1960s that had an Etch-a-Sketch on its couch, and a new state of the art RV that had not one but two flat screen tvs and very comfy chairs to watch them in.  Now, I freely confess that I am not one of those Americans who yearns to have one of these babies.  In fact, the idea of living in an oversized tin can while it is stinking hot or freezing cold outside strikes me as positively mad, but to each their own.

Despite their charms, given the price of gas these days, the whole RV thing isn’t doing too well.  Simply driving to the museum one passes dozens of businesses that are tied to the RV industry and I imagine these places are hurting right now.  And these industries employ thousands of people.  To give you but one small example, I have a friend who is a film maker and he was recently laid-off from a company that makes promotional videos for the RV industry.  They aren’t making too many movies these days on the glories of RV’ing, so his services just weren’t needed anymore.  And so here we are in 2008, and our local economy is hitched to an industry that is making something we simply don’t need.  We don’t need more slow-moving behemoths that get 5 miles to the gallon and clog our roads.  We don’t need movable houses that have microwave ovens and granite counter tops in them.  What we need is the exact opposite: we need to be at the forefront of creating green technologies.  We need to be working with Detroit in making an electric car.  We need more businesses like the bank on Edison Road that generates its own electricity by a windmill.  And so we have a choice: with each passing year we can pretend the world around us isn’t changing or we can adapt.  We can act like dim-witted dinosaurs or we can marshal our energies and evolve with the new world that is going to greet our children and grandchildren.  What’s it gonna be?

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on August 22, 2008
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Friday, August 15, 2008

A Tourist’s View of History

From the time we flew the family into Washington, D.C., dramatic passages of actual history kept intruding onto the grand touristy spectacle of our nation’s capital. Just before landing we easily spotted the big monuments and memorials–the razor-sharp Washington obelisk, the curving elegance of the Jefferson memorial, and the stately Capital dome at the end of the National Mall. And near Lincoln’s powerful columns was the black gash of the Vietnam memorial, a tear in the earth where so many people come to pay their respects. Once our plane landed, we were startled to see Senator Obama’s campaign jet parked across the way. All this history, all this government stuff is real.

But soon we’re distracted by family vacation basics, Tourism 101: Adventures in Transportation. In this course we study how to buy tickets for the Metro, which direction to travel on the Yellow line toward our hotel, and how to catch a cab to Chinatown for dinner.  History recedes a bit, waiting to catch us unaware.

And even though we vow not to treat the city as a mere checklist of landmarks, we ride the elevator to the top of the Washington monument, gush at the Hope diamond, and nod appreciatively at how little wiggle room John Glenn had in his Mercury 7 space capsule. Sure, we’re passing Tourism 102: Monuments and Museums but only with a grade of B. We lost points for running the kids ragged in the Washington heat.

History, meanwhile, has its eye on us. A placard indicates the spot on Pennsylvania Avenue where our fellow Americans used to buy both produce and slaves. We stand on the steps where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech before a crowd of tens of thousands. Our friend points to the front of a hotel and says, “That’s the sidewalk where Ronald Reagan was shot.” From the gallery of the House of Representatives we see the podium where Franklin Roosevelt said the words that took the country into World War Two. Real things that mattered happened right here. Today, though, we see House Republicans hooting like high schoolers at a pep rally, and a little boy beside us asks if they are having a clapping contest. The next morning we read about it in the paper.

Memories accrue day by day in Washington, but it’s hard to know whether they belong to the story of our vacation or the story of our country.  One story is a lot easier, a lot less frightening, to tell. In the Newseum I see a stretch of the Berlin Wall, all bureaucratic gray cement on one side, and a free artist’s rainbow of words and images on the other.  Behind it, the guard tower stands without ornament of any kind, implying a dictator’s gray threat of surveillance and torture – words that are hard to survive. And on the walls of the Franklin Roosevelt memorial, inspiring words that are hard to live up to: “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation. It must be a peace which rests upon the cooperative effort of the whole world.” Idealism, Roosevelt implied, is not a naïve luxury; it is the key to our survival. Overhead, President Bush’s helicopters pass by, in a hurry to be somewhere.

The Hoosier intern who showed us the House of Representatives confessed that it helps to have an important friend if you want to find a job in Washington.  It’s tempting to say, “Well, that’s just the way our government is.” On the other hand, we have the history, the many thousands who have rallied on the Mall, the elected officials who have sometimes chosen wisely on our behalf, and the millions who have voted them in and out of office.  Thank goodness it’s an election year.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on August 15, 2008
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • News & Editorial • Peace & War • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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Joe Chaney -- More essays by Joe

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April Lidinsky -- Eat it Over the Sink / More essays by April

Jonathan Nashel -- Looking at Dinosaurs / More essays by Jonathan

Jeff Nixa -- Ice Cream Man / More essays by Jeff

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Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Getting Together / More essays by Jeanette